le.

"Fine words butter no parsnips." There are some rare souls who lend to
the humblest tasks the dignity of their natures, but the average person
frets and fumes under similar circumstances. In its aims and purposes
housekeeping is the highest of professions; in its methods and technique
it ranks amongst the lowest of occupations. We must separate results,
ideals, aims, and possibilities from methods.

All work at home has the difficulty of the segregation, the isolation of
the home. Man, the social animal who needs at least some one to quarrel
with, has deliberately isolated his household, somewhat as a squirrel
hides nuts,--on a property basis. There has grown up a definite,
aesthetic need of privacy; all of modesty and the essential family
feeling demand it.

This is good for the man, and perhaps for the children, but not for the
woman. Her work is done alone, and at the time her husband comes home
and wants to stay there, she would like to get out. Work that is in the
main lonely, and work that on the whole leaves the mind free, leads
almost inevitably to daydreaming and introspection. These are
essentials, in the housework,--monotony, daydreaming, and introspection.

Let us consider monotony and its effects. The need of new stimuli is a
paramount need of the human being. Solitary confinement is the worst
punishment, so cruel that it is prohibited in some communities. We need
the cheerful noises of the world, we need as releasers of our energies
the sights, sounds, smells of the earth; we must have the voices and the
presence of our fellows, not for education, but for the maintenance of
interest in living. For the mind to turn inward on itself is
pleasurable only in rare snatches, for short periods of time or for rare
and abnormal people. Man's mind loves the outside world but becomes
uneasy when confronted by itself.

The human being, whether male or female, housewife or industrial worker,
is a seeker of sensations. Without new sensations man falls into boredom
or a restless and unhappy state, from which the mind seeks freedom. It
is true that one may become a mere seeker of sensations, a restless and
fickle pleasure lover who passes from the normal to the abnormal, exotic
in his vain search for what is logically impossible,--lasting novelty.
Variety however is not the mere spice of life; it is the basis of
interest and concentrated purpose as well.

People of course vary greatly in what they regard as vari